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Against wild enclosures: Michael Richard, Exceeding Enclosure: Indigenous Modernisms and U.S. National Parks, PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, 2025 »

Internal settler colonialism in vacated borderlands: Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, ‘Worldmaking practices of the Polish Bureau of Settlement and Resettlement Studies: Geographical imaginations of settlers in the recovered territories of post-1945 Poland’, Journal of Historical Geography, 2025

28May25

Abstract: This article focuses on the Bureau of Settlement and Resettlement Studies, an institution established to study Poland’s post-1945 ‘recovered territories’. It participated in worldmaking: shaping the geographical imagination and realities of Poland’s postwar recovered territories in historically specific ways. Drawing on data from field collaborators, the bureau’s archival practices contributed to framing the incorporation of the formerly German regions into Poland. By analyzing these materials, I demonstrate how scientific and political narratives were intertwined with settlers’ everyday experiences, revealing how archives became tools of both documentation and active participation in shaping postwar territorial and social realities. While previous research has focused on the methods and processes of resettlement, less attention has been given to the institutions created to plan the process according to scientific criteria. Through a close reading of archival sources, particularly 69 report cards from the bureau’s field collaborators in the Szczecin Voivodeship (1947–1948), this study demonstrates that the on-site correspondents, settlers themselves, actively shaped perceptions of the region, constructing narratives designed to guide official policy. In turn, this study offers new insights into how bureaucratic institutions and settlers co-produced knowledge designed to legitimize territorial claims and influenced the realities of postwar Poland’s shifting borders.


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